I’ve been writing the past few months about my serious concerns for the well-being of pregnant teens, teen moms, and their children. They risk poverty, health crises, and other serious challenges. I fear the resources available to them will shrink even more in the upcoming administration.
As we begin a new year, I’d like to turn my attention to existing support systems for teen moms and their children. Programs that assist these vulnerable young people deserve to be celebrated. I’ve reached out to several national and local organizations and will incorporate data and success stories as I receive them. I hope readers can suggest others as well.
One such program is the Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP), which operates in forty US states, in addition to Washington, D.C. and the US Virgin Islands. The model was developed more than forty years ago by David Olds, Ph.D. in Denver, Colorado. NFP has accumulated impressive evidence of success in that time. They’ve also expanded to include most of the United States. I was unaware of the NFP until my daughter brought them to my attention.
The NFP model pairs nurses with first-time mothers from early in their pregnancies to ensure a healthy pregnancy and delivery. Nurses continue working with families until their child is two years old. The organization has three goals: 1) improve pregnancy outcomes, 2) improve child health and development, and 3) improve economic self-sufficiency for the family.
Although NFP was active in Oklahoma when I taught teen moms there, I didn’t know of its existence. I wish I had. It would have been valuable to my students. In most states, the NFP operates in conjunction with community providers or state entities to deliver care. In Oklahoma, NFP partners with Children First, an arm of the Oklahoma Department of Health. It’s a function of most county health departments in the state.
The academic program I worked for also provided nursing care throughout a girl’s pregnancy to ensure a healthy delivery. After delivery, we provided onsite childcare, and counseling, plus programs to engage whole families in the care of the mom and her child, but NFP would have added in-home services that our program did not. While our school’s childcare was certified by and consistently ranked as top-tier by the OK Dept. of health, our students apparently didn’t receive the Children First services they offer.
Home visits can be crucial in such circumstances. It’s one thing to observe a young mom and her infant in an academic setting designed for them but altogether different from meeting the same mom and baby where they live. My daughter, an occupational therapist, recently moved from working with children in the huge Los Angeles Unified School District to working with children and adults via home visits.
For a teen mom, the challenges may be a dysfunctional family, lack of structure, or extreme poverty.
The change is dramatic, she says. “In a client’s home, you can see what specific obstacles they face, like rooms or furniture that are difficult to navigate. There are also unique benefits available. You can design supports that take advantage of their assets.” For a teen mom, the challenges may be a dysfunctional family, lack of structure, or extreme poverty. These aren’t necessarily detected at school.
In Texas, where I now live, NFP partners with existing entities to provide services for young women in 66 Texas counties, through grants established by the state legislature. While they partner primarily with adults (their clients’ average age is 23), they also work with teens. Evidence of their program success is multi-dimensional, but the statistic they’re most proud of is that approximately 90% of clients’ babies are born at term and at a healthy weight. A good start in life can go a long way.
NFP assistance is offered through Any Baby Can in Austin, just down I-35 from me, and I’ll research their services for a future piece. Any Baby Can accepts pregnant women who are not more than 28 weeks pregnant, to ensure critical nursing care is delivered in the weeks before the child is born.
Learning about local programs will be useful. I’m scheduled to meet with a counselor at Success High School in Round Rock later this month to discuss mentoring with a pregnant or parenting teen. I’m already an approved volunteer with the district and read to a few first graders each week at a nearby elementary school. Adding a few volunteer hours a week working with teen moms would be meaningful.
Long before I became a high school science teacher at a school for teen moms, I served as a volunteer mentor at the same school for three years, with varying degrees of success. The goal was to encourage students in their schoolwork and parenting and to ensure their timely graduation. Two of my mentees graduated on time. One student dropped out of the program mid-year, which left me feeling I’d failed. In retrospect, I can see that lives of teen moms are complicated. My goal with students in Round Rock would be to prioritize their graduation.
Programs like the one I taught at were designed to benefit the unique needs of our students and their children. I was devastated that the United Way chose to discontinue funding of the social services we offered, forcing it to close in 2017. I’m pleased to know there are other program models throughout the country that assist teen moms in becoming successful.
In the coming weeks, I hope to highlight several of them. I’m also looking for tips on other services in areas outside Texas to research, so please make suggestions. I look forward to hearing from you.
Janice Airhart 